The Sanctuary Seeker by Bernard Knight Page B

coroner had been found, and he, Robert FitzRogo, had fallen from his horse two weeks after his appointment and died from spinal paralysis. John had been left with the jurisdiction of the whole county until someone else could be pressed into service.
    Matilda chose to ignore this. ‘The devil with your excuses! The nub of the matter is that you are staying out all day and night, on some pretext about crowner’s duties when I know that you’re sitting in taverns or carousing with your old wartime comrades - and bedding as many dirty wenches as you can throw your leg over!’
    John purpled again with righteous indignation, though what she alleged was not far off the mark.
    Today, however, he had been out in teeming rain since dawn, had ridden thirty hard miles and had barely spoken to a woman.
    Richard de Revelle put in, ‘You’re a law officer, John, like myself. I don’t go chasing around the countryside after every petty criminal, I let my sergeants and men-at-arms do that. Why not stay in Exeter, direct matters and come home each day?’
    Matilda took up the theme: ‘Yes, send that Cornish savage to do the work - and your misshapen clerk.
    Have more dignity and less mud on your boots.’
    John stared at them scornfully. ‘Do I have a castle full of men-at-arms at my command, Sir Sheriff? And can I send my only servants to hold inquests for me in places thirty and forty miles away? If you find me someone to be coroner in the north and south of Devon, I’ll gladly stay in this city and be home every noon and night!’ His black eyes flashed. ‘And when I get home, what welcome is there for me? If it were not for the maid, I’d go hungry, for I fail to see you bustling about, Matilda, to see that the kitchen finds me a meal when I get back wet, tired and famished. All I get is your nagging and the smirks of your damned brother.’
    The others stared at him, surprised by the bitterness in his voice. Though they constantly bickered, this was stronger stuff than usual from John de Wolfe.
    He wagged a long finger under his wife’s nose. ‘And if you falsely accuse me, woman, then I’ll justify it by doing what you claim,’ he threatened, thinking attack the best form of defence. Striding away from the hearth, he delivered a parting shaft. ‘I’m going down to the inn, where at least I’ll get a kind word, some ale … and possibly a cheerful wench!’
    The heavy door made a satisfying bang as he slammed it behind him.
     
    He sat near a large log fire, leaning on a scrubbed table, screened from the main room of the inn by a wattle partition that formed an alcove near the hearth.
    The bones of half a chicken, some pork ribs and the crumbs of a small loaf lay scattered on the boards of the table, the remnants of a good meal that his mistress had provided an hour earlier.
    The Bush Inn was acknowledged as the best in Exeter, tucked away in Idle Lane, in the lower part of the town, not far from the West Gate and the river. For the moment he sat alone. Nesta was in the outhouse kitchen behind the inn, scolding the cook for being so long with another customer’s supper. Edwin, the potman, an old cripple who had lost an eye and some toes in the battle for Wexford over twenty years before, washed pewter tankards in a bucket of dirty brown water, before filling them with ale from two rough barrels propped at the back of the room.
    Seven or eight townsmen, all well known to John, sat on benches, drinking and gossiping.
    Something approaching contentment, born of the beer and the warmth, began to steal over him. His resentment and fury at his wife and her brother had been brimming over when he had stalked into the Bush, but Nesta’s affection and common sense had soon calmed him down. The good food and drink and his draught-free seat before the crackling sycamore logs had pacified him and he was now slightly sleepy.
    He took another long pull at the ale, bittered with oak-galls, and stared at the almost hypnotic leap of the